Democracy Now! Blog

From New York to Washington D.C. to Oakland, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets Saturday in the largest day of action since grand juries refused to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner in New York City.

"The carbon market is a mechanism to keep polluting if you’re able to pay," says Pablo Solón of the global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under negotiation at the United Nations climate summit in Lima, Peru.

Today marks the 45th anniversary of the death of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. On December 4, 1969, Chicago police raided Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. Watch our 2009 interview with Jeffrey Haas, author of "The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther."

In a Democracy Now! web exclusive, we speak with retired New York City Police Department detective Graham Weatherspoon about the grand jury decision not to charge a white New York police officer for causing the death of Eric Garner by placing him in a chokehold.

A grand jury has reportedly cleared the New York City police officer involved in the chokehold death of Eric Garner. A father of six, Garner died after police wrestled him to the ground and pinned him down.

During a press conference attended by the parents of Michael Brown, Amy Goodman questions Rev. Al Sharpton in Ferguson, Missouri, about whether the authorities allowed some parts of the city to burn last night.

We continue our interview about Albert Woodfox, a former Black Panther who a federal court has ordered to be freed after he spent more than 40 years in solitary confinement, longer than any prisoner in the United States.

Bryan Stevenson, founder and director of the Equal Justice Initiative, discusses pending executions, the history of lynching, and how Rosa Parks and others inspired him to "stand with the condemned and incarcerated."

The Senate has voted no on whether to approve the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline. On Monday, Democracy Now! discussed the Keystone XL proposal with Naomi Klein, author of the new book, "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate."

Watch part two of our look at a new investigation that tells the story of seven American hikers who went on a wilderness adventure into polar bear country in Canada’s Arctic tundra — and faced a harrowing attack. Scientists say climate change is greatly impacting polar bear habitat.

In 2009, Matthew Hoh became the first State Department official to resign protest from his post in Afghanistan over U.S. policy. Prior to his assignment in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh was deployed twice to Iraq. In part two of our conversation, we speak with Hoh about what happened after he blew the whistle on the Afghan War and his long fight to recover from post-traumatic stress syndrome. On his website, Hoh writes: "In 2007, after my second deployment to Iraq, PTSD and severe depression took over my life. I began trying to drink myself to death. Thoughts of suicide became common until they were a near daily presence by 2011."

As the nation prepares to mark Veterans Day, Democracy Now! has learned that Iraq War veteran Tomas Young has died just weeks before his 35th birthday. Young was paralyzed in 2004 shortly after arriving in Iraq. He went on to become one of the nation’s most prominent antiwar U.S. veterans speaking out against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He was featured in Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro’s documentary, "Body of War."

This week marks the 13th anniversary of the arrival of the first post-9/11 prisoners to Guantánamo Bay, the most notorious prison on the planet. This grim anniversary, and the beginning of normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, serves as a reminder that we need to permanently close the prison and return the land to its rightful owners, the Cuban people. It is time to put an end to this dark chapter of United States history.

Matt Taibbi talks briefly about First Look Media, the new independent journalism project funded by Pierre Omidyar. Earlier this year, Taibbi was hired to start a web magazine called "The Racket," which would focus investigative reporting on Wall Street and the corporate world.

DN! In Depth

By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan — The corporate television newscasts spend more and more time covering the increasingly disruptive, costly and at times deadly weather. But they consistently fail to make the link between extreme weather and climate change.